Chinese microcontrollers worth considering

[jupizz1010]

There are also a lot of "OR1" chips around, manufactured in China.

My HDMI video grabber is an example. It has an OR1 CPU @ 800Mhz coupled with an H264 encoder and a USB3 engine, all in one chip.

I bought it because I tried to hack when I was wondering if I would then find an ARM? MIPS? RISC-V? processor. No dice, I found it's "OR1"! Wait what? "OR" stands for "OpenRisc", a crappy RISC design with so many hardware bugs that you have to hack the toolchain to hack the tools of what you intend to hack.

hack(hack(...)), what is this? type of recursive hack? 

To save myself the day I stated that I lost 100% interest in that damn thing I parked on eBay for a couple of pennies

A couple of pennies can really lift values, here, at least because it saves you from that crazy stuff. I don't blame Chinese for that, just I don't understand companies like Allwinner when they deliberately use bugged OR1 design (and they know it has bugs) as co-processor for their Linux SoCs.

I am talking about the thermal unit controller used in Allwinner H3-H5 SoCs: if you don't want to go nuts with all its hardware bugs, you better turn it off, and keep the core frequency as low as possible (600Mhz instead of 1.2Ghz boost-speed), so they don't heat up. You lose performance, but at least your SoC doesn't burn out.

but was it 2 usd only ? do you have a link ? i'm curious now

[yufanmicroelectronics]

What kind of of microcontrollers you're are referring to?

[ebclr]

Many options here

http://wch-ic.com/products/CH554.html